As orchestras make their programming more inclusive, I’m grateful they haven’t forgotten George Walker (1922-2018), a modernist whose music carries considerable expressive force. Over the years, the American indie label Albany Records has recorded a sizeable chunk of Walker’s work, including a series of fine performances of the composer’s orchestral music with the Sinfonia Varsovia under the direction of Ian Hobson, but these new recordings offer new insights.

Franz Welser-Möst and the Cleveland Orchestra’s sampler spans more than a half-century’s worth of Walker’s career, giving us a kind of bird’s-eye perspective that reveals some crucial through-lines in the composer’s oeuvre – most notably the palpable sense of struggle that fuels so much of his music. This struggle is as clearly discernible in Antiphonys (1968, played here in a version for string orchestra) as it is in his works from his final years.

All of Walker’s music is thorny and highly changeable on its surface, yet running throughout it all is an insistent riptide of lyricism. This lyrical element blossoms most impressively – and affectingly – in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lilacs (1996), his song-cycle setting parts of Whitman’s elegy for Abraham Lincoln, ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’. Given the sombre subject matter, the music’s ecstatic nocturnal luminosity may come as a surprise. Latonia Moore seizes upon this rapturous quality, however, and although she sacrifices clarity of diction in the process, it feels very much a worthwhile trade.

Indeed, Welser-Möst generally responds most winningly to the lyrical elements in Walker’s music. Gianandrea Noseda, on the other hand – whose live recordings of the composer’s five brief but densely packed sinfonias are being released individually as ‘singles’ – focuses on the stark juxtapositions, and the results are notable for their dramatic frisson. Comparing their versions of the Sinfonia No 4 (2011), subtitled Strands to call attention to the music’s contrapuntal elements, both prove to be effective interpretative standpoints. Noseda’s is perhaps more immediately gripping, while Welser-Möst’s is more subtly inflected and has the advantage of the Cleveland Orchestra’s finesse.

The Sinfonia No 5, Visions (2016), exists in two versions: one with texts (terse statements, really) to be declaimed by soprano, tenor and two baritones, and one without. Hobson and Sinfonia Varsovia offer both (Albany, download only), while the Seattle Symphony has released a superb in-house recording (also download only) of the work’s posthumous 2019 premiere, led by Thomas Dausgaard (with texts). The score includes parts for a soprano, tenor and two baritones, but for some reason Welser-Möst employs a single voice. And while Tony F Sias is an authoritative speaker, I prefer Walker’s original multivoiced conception, as it suggests a kind of common effort rather than an aphoristic monologue. That said, Welser-Möst’s reading has more heft than Dausgaard’s, as well as greater poise.

For those unfamiliar with Walker’s music, the Cleveland Orchestra’s release would serve as an excellent introduction, especially as the booklet note includes a variety of scholarly essays as well as an illuminating interview with Walker’s sons.